Political Austen, Right and Left

This essay investigates Jane Austen’s early posthumous political reputation through several pieces of writing published in the early 1830s. It considers her brother Henry Austen’s biographical visions of her in terms of gender and authorship, in his ‘Memoir of Miss Austen’ (1833), which is an extended version of his earlier ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’, prefixed to Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1818). The essay compares Henry’s characterisations of his sister in light of the political rhetoric of the early 1830s to conclude that Henry’s writing may have been joining debates over voting rights and women’s suffrage that took place shortly before he revised his memoir of his sister.